


fever dream high

by tonyang (kurusui)



Category: PRISTIN (Band), SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: F/M, Summer Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:00:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23745706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurusui/pseuds/tonyang
Summary: In the wake ofgroup disbandmentcoming into her own asa soloistan individual artist, Nayoung has one new freedom.
Relationships: Im Nayoung/Yoon Jeonghan
Comments: 7
Kudos: 21





	fever dream high

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yoonbot (iverins)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/gifts), [rootcellars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rootcellars/gifts).



> to sapphy and jess, who inspire & encourage me always! & inspired by [cruel summer ♡](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic8j13piAhQ) (i recommend reading the lyrics)

Nayoung is so tempted to go on the hottest restaurant recommendation app right now and write a two-star review calling this the worst Italian-Korean fusion she’s ever eaten. But she’s never made an account on it, and it’s hard to imagine it not coming back around to bite her, what with her inability to make a username that isn’t somehow tied to her person and the fact that netizens can dig up anything on anyone. Instead she puts her phone down and twirls some more pasta onto her fork.

“I’m so unsatisfied,” she says, enunciating the word like it’s done something wrong to her.

“Why don’t you date someone?” Siyeon asked, ever the most blunt and uninhibited about things that probably should have mattered to her as an idol. Nayoung doesn’t know the full story, and glancing at the way Siyeon nurses her ankle even now, she neither wants to pry about it nor have to think about it. But there was probably more than one reason Siyeon sat in front of her gorging on gelato instead of in the isolation of a practice room. “Now that you can, I mean.”

“There are not a lot of decent men in this industry,” Nayoung tells her. The hot sun beats down on their patio table.

“Oh, well, that’s true, I suppose. But you know a few of them. Knew, at least,” Siyeon corrects herself. 

\

People don’t always act like they do in your head. One of those is Yoon Jeonghan, who has defied every one of her expectations from the minute he picked her up in his Audi to take her to a street food stall so they could get oil drippings all over their carefully chosen outfits.

“I don’t have that many black clothes, you know,” Nayoung says. “I’ll run out of things to wear.”

“Who said I was taking you on another date?” 

“Who said you were the only one I was planning to go out with?” she shoots back.

Jeonghan grins, but she can see the sweat roll down the side of his face and disappear behind the straps of his mask, pushed to his neck. Watch him try to pretend it’s from the heat of the grill in front of them.

“Was I your type?” he asks.

“You could never,” she says, thinking of past dreams of someone tall, handsome, kind, charming. Not that Jeonghan explicitly contradicts that description. She frowns.

“A certain someone told me I was your first choice.”

Nayoung is going to kill her. “She’s an instigator, you know that.” And the fact that Nayoung would never say that out loud. But if she says _that,_ she’s just going to look desperate.

“Even so,” Jeonghan says, picking up a cut of meat with his chopsticks, “I was hoping you’d give me more than one chance.”

“I won’t be blindsided by your surface-level sincerity,” Nayoung warns. “I didn’t even know you were close to Siyeon.”

“You would be surprised,” he says, “by the way people make their way back to each other after a collective traumatic experience.”

\

If it looks like a fling, acts like a fling, and is described as a fling, that should be all the relationship means to her. Alas. Nayoung sits cross-legged on her couch, messy ponytail up, watching television and resolutely trying not to think about it.

Jeonghan doesn’t have the decency to call, or even text to ask how she’s doing. Even if he doesn’t care, the tragedy is that she does. Nayoung doesn’t get to know how he’s doing unless she sees him in person because she’ll die before she looks his name up on a fan platform. Nayoung just stares at her phone sometimes, laid off-center on her coffee table, and jumps every time she gets a notification. It’s never him. She’s not going to be the girl who reads too much into it - he’s busy. He might not even be in the country. It’s fine.

In the heat of summer someone knocks on the door and she grabs her purse. “Figures,” she says, and refuses to explain even when he tries to get her to spill with aegyo that she knows is forced. 

Jeonghan, in turn, won’t tell her what they’re doing, but that’s okay with her anyway - he seems to know what he’s doing - she doesn’t want to do any of the work. 

“I want to go to the movie theater,” he says halfway through the car ride, and she tells him that’s fine with her and laughs.

“It looks like you can’t keep your mouth shut after all.”

“I have been known to almost divulge important secrets,” he says, and then goes on to tell her the entire story behind Jisoo’s childish Joshuji nickname, which he still isn’t allowed to tell the fans. “Don’t tell him I told you, or he’ll never trust me again.” Nayoung knows Jeonghan only told her because he could trust her.

Jeonghan’s car is sparkling clean. Nayoung guesses he doesn’t use it that often, not to go to work, anyway, and if he’s being honest not to take anyone else out either. On his dashboard is a little diamond sticker, and from the mirror hangs an battered keychain that upon pressing he tells her was given to him by Seokmin on his twenty-sixth birthday. “‘You’re getting old, hyung,’ he told me then. I don’t even want to think about how old we are now.” Sometimes it shocks Nayoung to remember they’re the same age, for everything that sets them apart, the giant gaps in their accomplishments. She says nothing back.

“I came into some money recently,” he says as they drive into the parking lot of an old movie theater in a quiet neighborhood. 

“You mean more than you usually do?”

“Money I didn’t really deserve,” Jeonghan says. “And my sister wouldn’t let me spend it on her because she’s too thrifty, and you won’t let me spend it on you because you wouldn’t get caught dead with a couple item.”

“It’s true,” she says, although it’s because she doesn’t want to get caught more than it is that she doesn’t want to have one.

“So I figured it wouldn’t be a bad day to buy out a movie showing.”

“What?” Nayoung nearly screams at him.

“Which one do you want to see?”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s locally-owned and I know the family. My parents do, anyway, it’ll be fine. We’ll get the theater to ourselves unless some harmless old couple decides to come in, and they probably won’t because it’s so late.” He puts the car into park and they just sit there, seatbelts buckled while Nayoung tries to process the million things going through her head.

“I love romcoms,” he says. “If you don’t have a preference I know what I want to see.”

“Not because you want an excuse to make out with me, right?”

“Ask anyone, they’ll tell you it’s true,” Jeonghan says modestly.

"How can you be so kind?" she asks, thinking of the way he makes fun of her, the little kids he waves at on the street, the callous way he speaks sometimes. Seokmin, who clings to him in all the vacation photos she’s seen of them. Jisoo, who he pranks endlessly and affectionately.

Jeonghan smiles. “It balances out in the end.”

Nayoung has always been the type to plan out everything she has to do meticulously. Here’s the number of hours she’ll spend in the practice room, here’s the list of vocal and acting classes she wants to take. Here’s the number of years she should expect to train before debuting. (Each year that passed, she resigned herself to reality and tacked another onto the end.) Here’s the ranks she’ll have to climb in the modeling world before she can expect to be offered lucrative endorsements and fashion shows. Jeonghan was an accident, though. The feelings were also an accident.

\

“We should call it what it is,” Nayoung says, standing in his apartment’s doorway for the fifth time. “So what is this?

“Hmm?” Jeonghan is dressed in jeans and a tucked in t-shirt like he’s just come out from her dreams and Nayoung could just start crying here and now. This is not how she wants to see him.

“What are we?”

“Nayoung, you’re treading on thin ice here.”

“You don’t want to know the answer?” she asks, frustrated. “Because I think I need to. I can’t keep calling it nothing.”

“Are you bothered by the way I’m treating it?”

“I didn’t contact you in the first place hoping this was going to last forever,” she says. And then, bracing herself, adds - “So why do I want it to?”

“Maybe I’m just that charming,” he says. She takes the door handle from him and slams it behind her. From the minute she left her house just to walk over here and not have any idea of what she was going to say she knew it was too late for her.

“You know, everyone told me I could do whatever I wanted when I signed to my new company. That they trusted me. But I can’t date you. It’s career suicide by association.”

Jeonghan’s gaze softens suddenly. “That’s why no one needs to know about it. It’ll be okay. We can hide it.”

“Where’s the honesty in a relationship like that?”

“What do you want, Nayoung?”

“I don’t know.”

Jeonghan asks her if she wants to sit down on the futon while he gets her a glass of water. She feels dizzy, and angry. At herself. He pours himself a glass of alcohol in the kitchen and without even knowing what it is she points and says, “I want that instead.” 

It tastes more bitter than she wants it to but she swallows it anyway. “I was never in love with you or anything. Unless it makes you feel better to think that,” Jeonghan says. “I think we both knew this was supposed to have an end point.”

“I don’t want you to lie to me.”

He grins. “You think it’s a lie that I’m not in love with you?”

“I never said that. I just don’t want you to lie about anything else.” She bites her lip, and his laughter breaks into a sigh.

“Well, then I’ll start there. It was a lie. I like you a lot, Nayoung. And I want you to be happy.”

Nayoung’s heart is beating faster than ever when she meets his eyes and asks how much he really means that. 

“I don’t want to get caught, of course,” he says, twisting a lock of her long hair in his fingers. “But I would risk it for you.”

“You idiot,” she says.

“I’ve never wanted anyone like this,” Jeonghan tells her, looking her dead in the eye. Nayoung shivers.

“Those are pretty little lies again.”

“They aren’t, at all,” he says, voice quiet, and leaning into his neck, she believes him.

\

**@seventeenschedule**

[SCHEDULE] 23:10 Wednesday

#Seungkwan, #Jeonghan -- MBC Radio Star panel

With idol actress Yoo Jungyeon

**SEUNGKWAN:** ...And it was pretty bad.

 **JEONGHAN:** _(objecting)_ It wasn’t that bad.

 **YOO JEONGYEON:** You can tell us, you know, you’re not under contract anymore. _(Everyone laughs at the irony.)_

 **SEUNGKWAN:** Well, since you asked... dieting wasn’t a problem. Dieting is one of those things where, as much as you hate it, you end up believing yourself that you have to do it, which is why so many of our members were on self-imposed weight loss plans. The part that was really annoying was not being able to use social media freely.

 **YOO JEONGYEON:** Ahhh, I know what you mean.

 **SEUNGKWAN:** We were managed severely in that way. Being told when we can make our accounts. _(He counts off on his fingers.)_ Being told, too, when we were allowed to post. Having to delete things the company didn’t like. Being told when we had to stop using those same accounts.

 **JEONGHAN:** And that’s why I made it clear I would never make an account, even if I wanted to.

 **SEUNGKWAN:** Yes, yes, we all know you gamed the system with your huge brain. _(More laughter.)_ But actually, I’m sure we didn’t have it the worst in the company. _(He pauses, and nods with certainty.)_ I’m sure it wasn’t us.

 **KIM GURA:** So who had it the worst? The unpopular ones? _(Seungkwan winces at the bluntness.)_

 **YOO JEONGYEON:** Popular idols lose some freedom, but unsuccessful idols lose all their privileges. I’ve seen it first-hand.

 **SEUNGKWAN:** It was like a tier list. And I’m not saying this to make it sound like we were all that - it was simply the facts of the matter. At one time there was us, and then our older brothers [NU’EST] and at the bottom... all of the women in the company were at the bottom. _(The studio goes silent.)_

 **YOO JEONGYEON:** That doesn’t surprise me.

 **SEUNGKWAN:** It shouldn’t.

 **KIM GURA:** There were a lot of girls in your company, right? Five or six years ago? Some of them were quite popular even.

 **SEUNGKWAN:** Yes, and because of the treatment, they all chose to leave. You see that even we left, and we were given many wonderful opportunities by the company. It was at the expense of others.

 **KIM GURA:** Jeonghan, you’ve been quiet.

 **JEONGHAN:** ...Yes. 

**KIM GURA:** Why so quiet? Is it because you were interested in any of the girls? _(Jeongyeon frowns, and Seungkwan looks like he wants to glare holes into Kim Gura’s brain.)_

 **JEONGHAN:** They just aren’t great memories. ( _He laughs shyly.)_ And most of them were younger than me anyway.


End file.
